Album review: Jamie T - Kings and Queens

Published on Sunday 6 September 2009 20:12

JAMIE T: KINGS AND QUEENS *** VIRGIN, £10.76

DECISIONS, decisions. Sometimes it is easier not to be distracted by aisles and aisles of choice, and just stick to the one thing you like. But there are other moments when you just want to play with all your toys at the same time. Wimbledon troubadour Jamie Treays (suddenly there's a surname to be bandied about) hasn't quite decided what kind of musician he wants to be when he grows up – but at least he sounds happy continuing to work it out.

Following his confident debut album, Panic Prevention, young Mr T underwent some kind of creative crash, which he likened to feeling like a Vietnam veteran without the homecoming party. Life's a breeze on your debut album – you have your whole life up until that point to write it, and no great expectations of where it might take you. But then it's time to deliver on that promise and Treays found himself standing at the musical crossroads hoping to be called in a particular direction.

He discovered Bob Dylan. "That ruined my life for a bit," he has quipped. The album of folk songs was ditched. Next, there was a home-made video for a track called Fire Fire, which revealed a taste for US hardcore punk. That turned out to be a one-off bone tossed to fans when Treays became conscious that this was not going to be an expeditious follow-up album. That song doesn't feature on Kings And Queens, though it might as well considering the selection box style of the finished album.

Treays remains a characterful player – it is just not always clear what that character is. One minute he's a smooth 80s troubadour on the chorus of Earth Wind & Fire, the next he's a ragamuffin folk-punk minstrel on Hocus Pocus, which is the only track that remains of his proposed, then discarded courtroom theme. In its creator's own words, Kings And Queens is "all over the shop" and it seems that is the way Jamie T likes it. On balance, the miscellany works in his favour. Imagine a British Beck, an elastic writer drawing on a different set of (mostly London-centric) influences – the pugnacious punk of The Clash, the scattergun rapping of the grime scene and the street poetry of, well, The Streets.

The similarity of opening track 368 to MIA's Paper Planes and its source material (The Clash's Straight To Hell) has already been noted. The ragged vocals are particularly reminiscent of The Libertines. Lyrically, the song is a dense patchwork of London place names, references to Margaret Thatcher, and a cast of supporting characters. Not for the last time, his runaway train of thought is difficult to keep up with, but it all boils down to the urban blues: "It's the only way that you're getting out, if you hang around, boys round here will they'll bring you down" goes the hookline.

Sticks'n'Stones is a chirpier evocation of a more thoroughly wasted life – underage drinking, gang fighting, the slide into drug abuse – with no obvious escape route: "When there's no-one left to fight, boys like us don't shine so bright." Like Glasvegas on their debut album, Treays treats the endemic hardman culture of the inner city with conflicted empathy.

It sounds like Mike Skinner is still something of an influential older brother on a couple of tracks which team his conversational, observation rhyming style with a catchy singalong chorus, particularly the summery sounding Chaka Demus which surveys the lifeforms down the local pub and concludes wistfully that "a lot of people around here lost the white in their eyes". On the humorous Castro Dies, this desire not to go the same way leads to a spiral of comic paranoia ("damn, I'm a goner, I'll end up working for the BBC as a runner").

British Intelligence is an old school "fight the power" punk song, while Spider's Web sounds more like Joe Strummer transported to the Appalachian mountains. I'm really not sure what Treays is on about here, but his rhyming dictionary is working overtime, linking Obama and Osama, Robert Palmer and "top banana".

There is still another of the many faces of Jamie T to be uncovered: confessional acoustic balladeer. There are shades of Pete Doherty in the casual poetry of Emily's Heart but, despite whimsical references to nights out at the dog track, the song is as dark and bloody as any traditional folk tune. Still wielding his acoustic guitar, he finishes with the ironic lament, Jilly Armeen, on which he declares that he is done with immortalising girls who don't care for him in song. On this eclectic evidence, that is only one of dozens of possible subjects he could be wrestling with depending on where his musical travels take him next. Don't rule out jazz.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Hank Williams III

The Garage, Glasgow, Thursday

WITH the Fringe circus packed up and shipped out, it's time to take a punt on one (or more) of the numerous rootsy American and Canadian acts inundating our shores this week – too many to mention, so we'll just plump for Hank Williams' grandson, who hotwires the family's country music legacy with a dose of raucous punk energy.

&#149 Tel: [phone]